Boy player is a common term for the adolescent males employed by Medieval and English Renaissance playing companies. Some boy players worked for the mainstream companies and performed the female roles, as women did not perform on the English stage in this period. Others worked for "children's companies", in which all roles, not just the female ones, were played by boys.
Read more about Boy Player: Boys in Adult Companies, Children's Companies, Responses, Famous Boy Players, In Film, Literature and Theatre
Famous quotes containing the words boy and/or player:
“The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)